Out of the blue comes the voice in the back.
“Dad, if I could change my name I think I’d call myself Woodland Muhammad.”
I almost crash the Honda into a fat Norway Spruce reaching down for the road. It is, I think to myself, maybe the best name I have ever heard. And I have heard some good ones.
Paris Hilton.
Sterling Marlin.
Hardman Petrikin.
Billie Holiday.
You know how it goes. You see a name like that and then you think about your own name and you realize that everything sucks. Someone could have named you Pleasant Unthank. For real. But instead, in the very moments after you were done being born, someone wiped the gut goop off your desperate lips and announced to the annals of all Time & Space that they were going to call you PlainAss Potato. Or whatever they ended up calling you. You know what I’m saying.
We could have been named Horace Buffalo Skinner Dementia.
Or Permilia Tennessee Preachertit.
But no.
Someone (bless them and their bottomless cup of conformity) named damn near each and every one of us the same thing. You/ me/ him/ them. Us. We’re all named Vanilla Christchild. Just different variations, you know? Maybe different spellings.
So when Henry, who is rushing 9 in a couple weeks, blurts out from the backseat this whole thing about ‘Woodland Muhammad’, I’m spun out into an entirely alternative galaxy of existence. It’s not my first rodeo; I’ve spun out into those lovelier frontiers before, but it never gets old. It has to be unexpected or the portal won’t open/ the gates won’t swing/ and all your wishy-washy mindfulness WD40 country horseshit will never be enough to even budge it.
The true plains of pure existence, right?…as far as I can tell they are only achievable when some kid utters some ultimate wisdom or beautiful thing entirely unbeknownst to them in a moment that comes entirely unexpected to you. Unexpected/ unforeseen/out of nowhere/ a whiff of cotton candy on the wind.
I love you.
Can you help me?
I saw something drive across the moon last night.
Dad, if I could change my name I think I’d call myself Woodland Muhammad.
In the car, in the Honda, on the dirty filthy seats that have been stained with blood and lake water and bug spray and suntan lotion and Kool Aid and Gatorade and puke and piss and shit and street dust from Philly and December mud from The Wheatfield and lollipop sticky and snot and Choco Taco dripping down little wrists on some bashing hot afternoon from some summer day that lives now only in this very rough patch of damaged interior car carpet that stands as the sole remaining monument on Earth to that lazy day when it all went down, before we forgot it all/like we always do, in the car at that moment, Henry kicks me across my everyday ice just to fall off the cliff of it into deep and wild space. Or something like it.
I email it to myself on my phone seconds after he says it.
I don’t know what it means or where it’s coming from. I noticed he had one of my books in his room the other night, a book about Muhammed Ali, and we’ve talked a lot about Ali before, so I suspect that the Muhammad part is linked to that.
The Woodland part?
I don’t know, man.
We are out on a drive, just me and him.
It is the afternoon and we are riding together down backroads, looking for turkeys in the fields maybe. Talking about stuff.
I get an email as we pass a barn collapsing beneath the weight of all the pigeon shit and starlight that have landed on her.
Ping.
My heart lifts/ maybe it’s the good news finally finding me as i am tired of the hunt.
Good news: I could use it. God, maybe it’s something that will lead to a little money. Right? RIGHT? Why couldn’t it be? I mean, sooner or later, someone is going to reach out to me and offer me something that will pay me money instead of taking my money, you know? It has to happen.
It has to at some point, doesn’t it?
“Write for us, Serge”. That’s the header of the email. And it’s wonderful news, spectacular shit recognizing my voice and my rare penchant for being real and tender at the same exact time.
I look at the gauzy sun/ cloudy pee-pee January glow/ oh Hallelujah! Jeff Buckley motherfucker yesssss!!/ I have been discovered and here we go now people/ let me come up now for the air you have been keeping from me all this time.
Private land woods spit a squirrel across the road.
I smile at him, good-naturedly, spirits soaring into the high financial ether of my very own creation. My boy in the backseat, he might be so proud today.
“Dude,” I will say to him in the rearview. I will catch his eye in that mirror and he will look at me with his same eyes as mine and we will lock-the-fuck-in, y’all. He knows something is up.
“Dude, guess who just sent me an email? Guess who wants me to write essays and stuff for them?”
He won’t say much but his lips will curl and the smile will tease the cheek/ movement of mountains/ creeks running back up the hillside into the hidden caves of outlaw gold heading my way.
“Who?” He says that. My son. Simple. True. A moment I will recall forever.
Except I don’t know the answer yet, duh. A vulture soars above a hard field and we drive directly under it at like 25mph. He looks down on the blue Honda cutting across the inner valley here, hollows leading back from the road, cricks, lanes back to where unseen people live their lives/ us moving slow past lanes winding back to unreal homes made of logs with big garages and maybe a backhoe and trailers full of ATVs parked out by the perfect barn wood and gray guest house where stranger than imaginable things have likely occurred in the lives of the contractor and his family/ or lanes creeping back, underneath the vulture seeing it all, remember, back back back to an aqua-colored trailer heaving in the air of cat smell, an old Coke machine with human bones inside of it back behind the place/ back underneath an ancient mound of tires and rusted tin and trash.
Fat-ass vulture looking down at all that and seeing the buried bones glowing like phosphorescent wood in the middle of the day. Then seeing me and Henry passing underneath/ our bones all lit up in his eyeballs. No one knew. Who knew. Vultures can see lit up bones.
I look at my phone, Henry looking out the window, no one saying anything.
I am hopeful, but you already know that it’s dumb.
We are only as good as what we remember, as what we notice going down us in real time just before it’s gone. It’s an almost impossible task, this deciphering my gist here. I was only trying to show you that I’m still wildly unremarkable in the face of all that magic raging out of control behind me. In front of me. Under the bed at night, magic pushing up on the mattress from the darkness by a lost sock.
What the hell are you talking about?
Who emailed you?
Are you on drugs?
End this now. There’s no story here. It’s rambling.
I know. I know. Go easy, Hoss. I do my best and anyways: you know what’s coming. Don’t act like you don’t.
At a stop sign, we rest. I check my phone.
The email.
It’s from: sergebielanko@gmail.com
To: sergebielanko@gmail.com
It reads, obviously: Woodland Muhammad.
In the back seat he has already forgotten that he said it. He has no idea that I sent it to myself and then forgot that I did that in this bad connection valley. Seconds later, he will never know; I heard the email chime thing and my spirits soared. Pathetic.
In an instant, I can build my own $800,000 log homes back long lanes without any heavy lifting.
He probably knows this about me. Or maybe he doesn’t. Either way it’s alright, I think.
He has forgotten the brilliance that he threw at me five minutes ago. A Chinese star to the back of my neck. A long-lost Larry Brown story condensed into two words. An album for the ages. The most important film of all time and a painting that, at long last, reveals the tried and true meaning of life.
At least it seems that way to me.
But I live so far back up in my own head that even that vulture has trouble spotting the bones under all the trash behind my trailer.
They’re there though. In the dirt. Under the tin.
Waiting to be discovered.